Human Sacrifice vs. Ritual Murder in The Lottery, by...

Imagine this; it is 9am, the sun is out and even though the children are playing , but before the day is done, someone will find themselves the winner of the lottery. However, it is not the lottery that most are familiar with. In 1988 author Judy Oppenheimer conducted an interview with author Shirley Jackson, the author of The Lottery . In this interview Shirley explained why she wrote the short story in the following excerpt ; I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the storys readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives (Oppenheimer 1988 ). In order to identify the key elements of the†¦show more content†¦7 ). At this point, the readers of the story may be thinking maybe someone is going to win a trip or something of that matter or perhaps even enough money to pay for all the souvenirs that they would be sending to their families and friend while on their summer vacation. It is possible, that the thought of someone winning a brand new shiny car could have crossed the mind of some other reader of the short story. Was this the case? Author Shirley Jackson makes a daunting effort to give the impression of everything in this small town being normal. She writes about some of the children of the story. Her efforts to depict the children doing what children do best, playing, added a simple twist to the story, and that same twist would soon shock the readers once they realize the purpose of the stones the young boys were playing with were actually going to be used to stone someone to death, but not just yet. One of the main characters of the story, Tessie Hutchinson, made her way to the lottery a little bit late, flustered and out of breath. She even admits to forgetting what day it was. However, despite all odds, she still made it on time (SparkNotes Editors ). At this point the author makes a humungous step in the sto ry that is intended to confuse the reader. Most readers would probably think , this must really be an important event ; Tessie must have been running or at least walking very fast, trying to make it to this